The True Story of Gary Faulkner, the Man Who Hunted Osama bin Laden and Inspired Nic Cage's Army of One

You might have heard about the spectacular misadventures of one Gary Faulkner. Equipped with little more than a sword he'd bought on a home-shopping network, a pair of night-vision goggles, and the blessing of a vengeful Christian God, the 50-year-old ex-con (and his failing kidneys) traveled to the most volatile region of Pakistan to capture Osama bin Laden. What's surprising is that it wasn't his first attempt. It was his eleventh.

Talking to Gary Faulkner's friends, the impression you get is that they had become so accustomed to this one unusual fact about good old Garythe pursuit that would eventually bring about his weird, jagged flash of famethat it had come to seem quite commonplace. Routine. Unremarkable. Just one more detail about a man they knew:

Gary was the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back. Gary could eat prodigious amounts of chicken wings. Gary was an inventive contractor and carpenter who excelled at tile countertops. Gary was always joking around. Gary disappeared every now and again to hunt down Osama bin Laden.

When it was reported in June that a 50-year-old from Greeley, Colorado, had been found high in the mountains of Pakistan near the Afghan border carrying a sword, a dagger, a pistol, and night-vision equipment and apparently declaring "I think Osama is responsible for bloodshed in the world, and I want to kill him," the romance of such a solo quest struck a chord around the globe.

There were skeptics, too. No wonderit already seemed such a lunatic and improbable tale. But one kind of skepticism, at least, made no sense at all: the notion that this was an act of publicity-seeking. If that had been all Gary Faulkner had wanted, then he would surely have tried to interest the world in his missions before now. This was, after all, his eleventh attempt.

Gary's youngest brother, Scott, a doctor in Fort Morgan, Colorado, drove him to the Denver airport two weeks earlier, on May 30. "He was in great spirits," says Scott. "He was excited about his trip. I remember he was looking at his crossbow, deciding whether or not he should take it." Outside the airport, Scott used his phone to snap what he feared might be the last photo of his brother, turning and grinning to the camera. Scott recalls his farewell: "Be safe, come back to me alive, and keep your head low."

"You got it!" Gary replied.

Scott began to discover how poorly this last injunctionthat his brother keep his head lowhad worked when his phone rang at four in the morning on June 15. Soon everyone knew, including their mother, who didn't even know Gary was in Pakistan until Fox News called.

"Yeah," she told them. "I know a Gary Faulkner. But he's on dialysis three times a week."

Scott, who became the family's de facto spokesman, gave interviews explaining that this mission wasn't some whim of his brother's but something he had been committed to for a long time, and for which he had planned carefully. Over these first few days the question Scott had to field most often was: Do you think your brother's crazy?

"Well, as a physician I see people with psychological problems all day," he says, "and I could attest that he did not have psychosis, paranoia, schizophrenia, any of those diagnoses. Yes, it's out of the norm, but that's what Gary does. It was his passion, his calling."

It wasn't clear whether Gary had committed, or would be charged with, a crime in Pakistan, but eventually the family was informed through the State Department that he could come home if they sent $683 to pay for his changed airline ticket. At the airport, Gary addressed the media scrum: "What this is about is the American people and the world," he told them. "We can't let people like this scare us. We don't get scared by people like this. We scare them. And that's what this is about."

"I believe that is going to go down in history," his other brother, Todd, tells me, "and kids are going to write essays about that 200 years from now."

We expect our heroes to be exactly how we want them to be. Our idiots, frauds, and madmen, too. But from the first moment that he was allowed to tell his own story, Gary Faulkner made clear that it would often not fit with anyone's expectations, and that furthermore he really wasn't too concerned with whether it did or whether it didn't.

From the start, he wanted to clear up some misconceptions about what he was doing in Pakistan. He told everyone who would listen that he had never planned to kill Osama bin Laden but rather to capture him and deliver him to the Pakistani authorities. It turned out that this information was contained in CNN's original report, but the narrative of Faulkner as the armed solo avenging assassin was so compelling that this was widely ignored. You could almost feel the disappointment when Faulkner kept insisting upon his nonlethal intentions, because it seemed less melodramatically satisfying, and also because it seemed even more impractical. (As did Faulkner's further puzzling suggestion that once he had found bin Laden he had hoped to use his dialysis machine, for if the reports are correct, they share an affliction.)

Faulkner soon flew to New York to appear on The Early Show, The View, Letterman, and Fox News, where he seemed, second by second, to charm, scare, and confuse his hosts. A few of his tropes became familiarhis habit of referring to his target as "Binny Boy," for instance, and, more annoyingly, his insistence on always referring to the former ruler of Iraq as "Saddam who was insane" with a lilt in his voice that suggested he had just said something both potent and witty. And despite protests from both Letterman and the View interviewers, as Faulkner explained his mission from God he persisted in calling the inhabitants of the country he had just visited "Pakis." It became clear that he was dancing to the beat of a very different drum and that, in his insistence on being honest to himself, he might say almost anything. This is one of the final questions he was asked when he was interviewed by his local TV station, on Denver's 9News, and his answer, in which one syllable of their question seems to trigger a quite unexpected series of revelations:

"You have been described as everything from a hero to a crackpot. What are you?"

"I'm a little of everything. I've done crack, I've done crank, I've done coke, I've done pot, I've done everything in the world out there. You know, I've been to prison, I've been shipwrecked, blown up, shot, stabbed. My story does not just start here; it started when I was 5 years old, the first time I tried to hot-wire a car."

The day after he returns from New York, I meet Faulkner at his local dialysis center in Greeley, where he's happy to talk while connected to a machine for four hours, as he must be three times every week. But when he arrives, he is taken straight to the hospital, the North Colorado Medical Center, with a temperature of 104. It is there, the following afternoon, that we finally begin to talk. Faulkner has various monitors connected to him, and on his chest just below his right shoulder hangs the catheter that is permanently plumbed into his circulatory system. This catheter has become infected. Official diagnosis: bacteremia. Patient's own description: "I'm feeling a little better, but I still feel very loopy. I'm jacked up. It's really getting me on the tizzy up and down and stuff. I've got so many toxins and poisons in my body, it's just like 'wow.' I've been having the shakes and the shivers. It's almost like convulsionsit's a pretty ugly sight. Hey, you know, the champ's down right now, but I'll be back up before the ten count."

Faulkner discovered that his kidneys weren't working last year while he was hiking in the Rockies, checking out some new high-altitude gear he'd gotten for his next trip to Pakistan. People might rush to assume he is somehow paying a rough price for youthful recklessness. He himself says, "I've tormented my body, I've been used and abused, but there's a saying that a very dear friend of mine has: We were not meant to go to the grave in a pristine, well-kept body but to come power-sliding in, totally spent, and say, 'Whoooooo! What a ride!' Well, I'm still on that ride." Even so, it is likely to have happened anyway. Polycystic kidney disease runs in the family; it's what caused Gary's father's fatal heart attack when he was 45.

Faulkner has plenty of colorful stories about the mischief he would get up to in his youth. He talks about transporting coke, marijuana, and pills across the border from Mexico, partying while the drugs were loaded or unloaded from wherever they were hidden: "It was just the excitement, the thrillI was an adrenaline junkie." He talks about a bank job. He has endless tales about driving too fast, and liberating vehicles that belonged to othersmost of his convictions involved this. (His longest stretch inside was for four years.) "I boosted everything, it didn't matterdump truck, forklift, cars, boats, whatever." One time he nearly stole a helicopter. He thought better of it when he saw all the gears, but he was tempted. "They should never have left the keys in there."

It's easy to romanticize this kind of thing, and Faulkner is not immune to that temptation. Part of his patter and self-justification is that it is his experiences in this part of his life that offer him a unique advantage in his missions. When you think like a thief, you are free of all those inflexible military rules and habits. The thief has a different style of approach: "Like I say, it's easier for a mouse to get into a castle than a lion." And that is his goalto steal away with a person as his loot. "I'm going in there as a thief, not as a military mind. I'm boosting this guy right out from underneath their noses."

But he can also be stern with himself and characterize those years as wasteful, repetitive, and ultimately fruitless.

"Yeah," he reflects, "high-speed chases are fun, and breaking into a vault is fun, but everyone at some point pays the piper, and when it ends, it normally ends ugly." One day I'll overhear him talking to someone he has just met, explaining something of his life and reflecting on his newfound celebrity: "People say, like, 'You're a wonderful guy.' They don't know the whole story. I was a piece of shit. I ruined people's lives, literally. But I'm honest about it."

September 11 took its time to fire Gary up. He remembers reading an article about bin Laden hiding out in the mountains of Pakistan, but he didn't even really know where that was. It was around 2004 that his mission came to him. "He just had a dream about hunting down bin Laden," remembers Jim Sage, who has worked on construction jobs with Faulkner over the past decade. "In his dream he was supposed to get there without his feet touching the ground." At first, Faulkner took this to mean that he had to go by boat. So he bought a twenty-one-foot yellow-and-white yacht called the Pia Colada. He'd never been in a boat before, other than on freshwater lakes and waterskiing, but a friend showed him how to put up the sail. Ignoring the Coast Guard's admonitions that his boat was illegal because he had no life jackets, no flares, and so on, he set sail from San Diego. He figured he'd head west across the Pacific and work it out from there. There is documentary evidence that supports much of what Faulkner says he did on future trips, but one wonders whether it can be true that he was really at sea for twenty-two days without any food to speak of before a hurricane threw his boat against a beach halfway down the Baja Peninsula in Mexico. Either way, it was his first failed attempt.

The next year, he bought another boat, which he was readying in his friend's driveway in Northern California when, in an accident involving the mast, he badly dislocated his shoulder. He decided that there had to be a better way. He sold the boat, bought a plane ticket, and within a week he was in Pakistan for the first time. It was the spring of 2005.

He had no idea about anything: "I didn't know how hot it was. I didn't know anything about the people, the language. I didn't know diddly-squat." But he had faith that what he needed to know would be revealed to him. He traveled from Islamabad to Lahore to Sialkot, where he stayed on a military base and was finally directed to a town in a northern tribal area called Gilgit. There he began to explore the remote mountainous hinterland.

It is hard to know how to judge Faulkner's accounts of what he discovered on each Pakistan trip. My hunch is that everything that he says happenedin terms of his own experience and of where he went and what he diddid actually happen. What might be more questionable is the significance of what was happening to others he came across, and their relevance to his stated quest. On his first trip, for instance, he says that he found himself more or less running for his life coming down from the mountains and that he lost his pack and his money and his blade. That evening, at the Madina Hotel Guest House in Gilgit, where he was staying, he says that the military guard who was posted outside was shot dead through the head, and that he was told that this was done by the same peopleAl Qaeda, he assumedwho had been chasing him down from the mountains. He also says that he found something encouraging in this turn of events: "I thought it was pretty cool, myself, because I shook the tree and at least I got a response."

He made four other similar visits before his most recent trip to Pakistan. (These were attempts numbers 4, 5, 9, and 10.) He describes them to me in some detail. Recently, he'd moved his attention to the mountains west and southwest of Chitral, toward the Afghan border. (When pressed on the reasons for such decisions, he generally alludes to an unspecified combination of inside information, local help, and divine guidance.) During the first of these Chitral trips, he believes he met a very high-ranking Al Qaeda official when he inadvertently shared a car with a man who had a particularly unwelcoming demeanor. That was also when Faulkner says he wandered for four days among Al Qaeda workers up near a cave mouth, in disguise and unidentified. "There were a lot of people running around with axes and all kinds of stuff," he says, "working on cutting down trees and making the new cave." On his second trip to Chitral, he says that he would sleep up there in the mountains on a bed of pine needles covered in a rug for days at a time. Watching that cave. Waiting for Binny Boy.

I visit him again in the hospital the next morning. When I walk in he is lying on his back with his eyes closed, headphones on. He is listening to Nickelback on the pink iPod Shuffle he had with him in Pakistan. (Also on the playlist of the dedicated Osama-hunter: Bon Jovi, the Eagles, the Zac Brown Band, Creedence.) He says that there's another song he likes a lot, "Voice of Truth," by the Christian rock group Casting Crowns, about having the faith to step out of a boat on top of the waves. "It's not like I'm in it for the money," he says. "I'm in it because of my faithand that's where he's at, too, so it's the two titans of their faith. He stood up on a world platform and made his announcement, I stood up on a world platform and made my announcement, and we're getting ready to go toe-to-toe."

Do you think Osama is fundamentally evil?

"Absolutely, yeah. There's no doubt. His god is actually Satan. Mine's the Living God."

Faulkner is feeling better today, though he says, "I can still smell the toxinsI've been sweating it out of my body." He rhapsodizes about the shower he had the previous night—his first since last December. "I flooded that thing! I didn't care. It felt soooooo good."

She says that aside from dialysis, the recommendation is for "normal activity." She pauses. "Whatever normal is."

Before he leaves the hospital, he orders lunch and eats it in his beda cheeseburger with olives, mustard, and Thousand Island dressing, with some cottage cheese and fresh fruit on the side.

"I don't want French fries," he specifies, "because of the potassium."

He talks about moving to a remote new home that has been found for him, and about his plans to get a wolf the following week. He says he'll train it by walking the property's perimeter over and over. He had a wolf once before, when he was married. She was called Jessie. She ran away while he was in prison.

I travel around Colorado, crisscrossing the Rockies, visiting his friends. On the warm afternoon of July Fourth, in a trailer park in Orchard Mesa, on the south side of Grand Junction, an extended family are celebrating, among them Daren Paredes, his mother, Esther, and her brother Tony, all close friends of Gary's.

"Man, he has a spirit," says Daren. "It's hard to be down around him." They reminisce about the firework fight they had on a previous July Fourth, and Tony points with pride to a scar on his torso from a firework of Gary's. He says Gary liked to come over to his house and watch shows like Survivorman. Tony gave him his pig sticker, the knife he was found with in Pakistan. ("I got it at a pawnshop. It cost me like eight bucks. He liked it and I was, 'You know what—go get bin Laden.'") Daren says they liked to go to the all-you-can-eat-buffalo-wings at the New Plantation Restaurant in Evans, and how sometimes they'd get through about six buckets—about sixty wings each.

When the local newspaper in Grand Junction, The Daily Sentinel, compared Gary to Forrest Gump, Esther was so incensed she phoned them up: "How dare you call my friend that? You guys don't know him."

I meet two other friends, Jen Oliver and Peggy Gates, at Peggy's home in Golden. It was Jen he was staying with when he was diagnosed with kidney disease. Both of them have had Gary living with them while he worked on their houses. (It takes me a while to realize this, but for most of the last fifteen years before his diagnosis, Faulkner was technically homeless, living on the site of whatever job he was doing.) It was while watching Knife Show on TV with Jen and her husband that Gary spotted the $300 samurai sword.

Both would ferry him down the mountain to Denver early in the morning for dialysis. They say that he seemed fine about his kidney problems at first, but then it really hit himthe reality of a life like this with no home, no savings, and little more than $449-a-month disability with a few food stamps. They thought he wouldn't go back to Pakistan, but it was Peggy who ended up buying his $1,700 plane ticket, money she owed him for work on the house. "I didn't think he would come back this time," says Jen. "I thought it was death for sure. But he was totally prepared for death."

So far, three of Faulkner's eleven attempts—attempts numbers 6, 7, and 8—have not been mentioned. None of these involved a successful visit to Pakistan.

Attempt number 8 faltered in the place that sometimes seems a rapacious machine invented purely to suck down well-intentioned plans: Las Vegas. Each time he wanted to fly to Pakistan, Faulkner had to first visit Los Angeles to apply for a visa. In January 2008, he decided to do the trip by road, accompanied by his friend Tony Montana and a man they knew as Pickles. They left on Friday, just after they'd been paid. On the way, they decided to stop off in Las Vegas. That was that. "I still don't remember all of Vegas," Gary says. "And I forgot the whole reason why I was going out that way anyway." No Los Angeles. No visa. Convinced that he would get in anyhow, he still made his scheduled flight to Pakistan.

There he was sternly informed that he should take the next plane home.

Attempts numbers 6 and 7 were failures of a different kind. Faulkner's vision that his feet wouldn't touch the ground led him to the certainty that on his next expedition to Pakistan, he should approach bin Laden in a new way—by hang glider. He also decided that the perfect and proper place to try out such a hang glider would be Israel: "I've got to test it somewhere, so in my mind: Well, if I go to Israelt—he Dead Sea! Hit the water, you float!" He found a hang glider for $500, cut it up into six-foot pieces that would fit into a long ski bag, and crafted brackets to reassemble it using the copper tubes from a cabin he was renovating at the time. In Israel in September 2006, he put it back together and prepared to launch himself off a cliff by the Dead Sea. He had never flown a hang glider in his life. "I just figured everything else I'd ever done in my life is: Jump on and go for the ride."

This ride was short. Three seconds later, he had several broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder. "Damn, I crashed hard," he says. "I still feel that one."

A sensible man might have decided to put hang gliding behind him. Faulkner asked a local hostel to store his flying machine until he could return.

He was back the following August. This time, he decided, he should take off much closer to the water. There was maybe twenty feet between him and the water when he launched himself. "You think I could hit the water? Not on your life. I was dragged and smashed and beat down by the rocks. I ripped up my shins this time." He undid his harness, left the remains of his glider on the rocks, and hobbled to the road.

"I normally give stuff two tries," he explains. "And if it doesn't work by the second time, I'm through."

As far as Faulkner is concerned, analyzing the tactical sense or practicality of his plans is, when it comes down to it, beside the point. He is on a mission from God. He follows his heart, not his mind: "If you have the heart to go out and do something, you go do it. If you have a mind to go out and do something, you're going to be in trouble, because your mind is going to try and calculate and figure things out."

And God has told him that he is the man to do this. "I'm the one that the Lord put his finger on and said, 'You're it.' I accept thatI take that responsibility all the way to the grave with me if I have to. When you really look at this story, you stop and you think, Okay, here's this guy now, is he just crazy, is he a fool, or what's happening? People just still don't get the real gist of what's happening. God's making a statement. It isn't me. I'm just doing what I am programmed to do through my faith. Nothing is actually a thought process; it's emotion out of my heart. Because when I start thinking about stuff, I'll get confused. I don't have a clue. And I'll be the first to say it."

He knows some people think he has a death wish: "I don't have a death wish. What I do have is a wish to be obedient and to do what I'm designed to do. Everybody's designed to do something. Other people are, 'Oh, I'd be scared to go there.' " He grins. "That's why you're not going there."

There is little reason for those who do not share Faulkner's faith to accept his interpretation of what has happened or what will happen. But if you suspect he is simply some kind of fantasist, I think you are wrong. Though he sometimes seems prone to elaboration, his specific accounts of events over a period of time are generally consistent down to small details. His passport confirms that he made these trips. And an unedited sampling of his recent e-mails shows that his current account of what he was up to matches what he wrote at the time.

"I'm a very bold person, and I can be a little obnoxious sometimes," he says, "and I can be a little bit boastful sometimes, too, but I'm true to my faith, and I'm true to my God and my heart. I can't be anything else. If you don't want to hear the answer, don't ask. I'll try to be as nice and gentle as I can, but there's a point where, you know what? Parole's denied!"

On this last trip, he flew into Islamabad carrying with him his new pig sticker, a few light clothes, some mountaineering pants meant to be worn over clothing to keep the wind off (he didn't use a tent), his King James Bible, a copy of Andrew Wommack's A Better Way to Pray, and the Liberty Dollar he has taken on all his travels for many years.

In Pakistan he was reunited with the rest of his equipment: the night-vision scope, a Night Hawk that he'd originally bought at Big 5 in Greeley; his samurai sword; his Smith Wesson handcuffs; and a .30-caliber Chinese pistol that carried eight rounds and had no safety. He'd picked up this gun on a previous visit. The first time he mentions it, he tells me that he bought it for about $100 "in Chitral in the back alleys," but another time, when he is trying to impress on me that he has had more informal encouragement from the authorities than he is able to let on, he says, "I mean, how do you think I got the gun? Yeah, we tell everybody it was the back alley and stuff, but a very special person delivered that gun to me as a matter of fact. Shit, this is a brand-new gun."

He checked into room 4 of the Ishpata Inn in the Bumboret Valley south of Chitral. He spent some of this first week making preparations, but when he finally tried to climb toward the cave where he believed bin Laden was now hiding, he found his strength lacking. He called Jen. "He came down," she says, "and he goes, 'Whoa, I can't do it. I tried to do it, I can't go up there, I'm real weak now.' " He'd also come to realize that Pakistan wasn't without medical resources, so he asked her to research not just dialysis but also kidney transplants in the area. She e-mailed back to him a number of options; the closest dialysis center was the Rehman Medical Institute in Hayatabad, Peshawar, so he took an all-day bus ride there and got two hours of dialysis. On his return, after a day in which he says maybe seventy Al Qaeda members came down from the mountains to threaten the locals, he e-mailed her with a requested update on his physical, mental, and spiritual well-being:

I'm physically ok, mentally demented, SPIRITUAL I'M ON FIRE!!!!!!!!!!
I went to a al quida meeting today at the P.T.D.C. They told the
elders that they now have the north hill side and every body is
freaked out because they don't know what is going on next, Well I have
to get ready to go.

Gary says he was told that Al Qaeda had not only noticed him but photographed him and was circulating his picture. After dark that night, believing they were soon coming to get him, he headed up the mountain. He heard barking he believes revealed Al Qaeda's movement through a nearby ravine. They were searching for him; the military police were searching, too. "It's old-school for me, because I used to be a thief, so nighttime is my time. I laugh. Here I am in the middle, they've got a squeeze play going on, and once again I slipped away in the night." He laughs. "I love it. I'm glad that I was a criminal."

At daybreak, what would be portrayed in press reports as his "capture" by the government took place, though he insists that he simply stepped out from where he had been hiding and flagged two policemen walking below. Faulkner is likewise convinced that he connived with the police to put on a show that he was being arrested so that no one who had helped him would be implicated. "We came up with a plan," he insists. "Everyone played it off cool. They did it by the book to make it look like an arrest—they had me blindfolded and a hood on, the whole works. But that was also at my request." When I suggest that some people may wonder, just because this was what Gary thought was going on here, whether it really was, he replies: "What do I give a shit what anyone thinks? Hey, kiss my ass, I'm the one that was there." In support of his narrative, he points out that they didn't take his gun. As he sees it, the custody he was in until he left the country was part of the same continuing act of theater by authorities who tacitly endorsed and supported his actions and intentions. He points out that while he was in their care, they gave him Pizza Hut pizza.

If one were making a bad bio-pic, there are a few obvious moments of redemption and revelation one might choose to depict in the life of Gary Faulkner. The first came when he was 5. Faulkner maintains that he had the specific vision that set him upon this path before his sixth birthday. It would happen over and over. There were these monsters coming at him—well, what seemed like monsters to a 5-year-old, though he now recognizes them as men dressed as they are in the Himalayan foothills. He told his mother that these creatures were trying to kill him. One day the Faulkner family went to the carnival, and Gary got a balloon on a stick. When the balloon popped, leaving nothing but the stick, he says that his mother said to him: "Here, this is your sword, and when they come at you again, you kill them." The next time they came at him, he wielded his sword, and he killed every single one of them; he says that his mother saw him do so and that she told him he had seemed like a real man with a real sword.

He believes that this is the dream he has been living out, and the search he has been on, ever since. In his vision, after the bad people had been conquered, he would find himself in a cave. "Once I get to the cave," he explains, "then the earthquake hits. That's how people will know that he's been captured around the world without hearing the report. I'm standing here in the cave watching it, and I'm seeing the dirt and the rocks and everything come crashing down. I never actually saw Binny Boy. He's in the cave, but he's trapped because it all caves in on him."

This is what you saw when you were 5?

"Yeah. Exactly, and I still feel it. You experience something and you know you were there, but this is so much far beyond that. It's like you read a book and then all of a sudden the movie comes outnow you see all the color and the peoples and everything else. I know it sounds strange."

So you're just making the movie of a book you've already read?

"Right. See, I already know how it ends, because I've read the book. I know the ending of this. And that's why I'm so positive and how I'm so determined and without that fear. It's incredible."

So, specifically, do you really believe that's how it will endthat you won't lead him out. You'll just be there and then the cave will collapse?

"Yeah. Then the people will come up and dig him out. It's already been prepared. Everything is set and ready to go. I just got to get there. They know the signal, they know what to look for. And then they'll drag him down."

He won't be killed by the collapsing cave?

"No, he's just going to be trapped in there. He's going to be trapped in there because he can't die in battle."

I do try to discuss it with his mother, this vision her eldest son says he had when he was 5.

She shrugs.

"He never mentioned it," she says.

So I ask her whether there was any clear ambition or calling that Gary seemed to have when he was a young child. She allows that there was:

"He wanted to be a fireman."

We had made plans to meet up again in Colorado, but instead Faulkner heads east in his brother Scott's truck to help his niece Nikki, who is moving to Massachusetts. I catch up with him in a motel there, fresh out of the bath. He sits talking to me in nothing but a towel, his twin green and blue catheter nozzles hanging down his chest. He tells me that he has hurt his right foot on a curb, though tomorrow he will change his mind and diagnose it as gout caused by the pizza he ordered with everything on it. On the bedside table is a prescription bottle. He says someonethe maid, he suspectshas helped themselves to his medical marijuana. ("I'm a sativa guy, not an indica guy," he tells me; when he was searched at the end of his recent Pakistan adventure, aside from his weapons, they found a small amount of hash.) Gary's unlicensed Glock .40 and his hollow-point bullets are in his day bag. (There is a fairly long list of rules Gary eschews. Seat belts, for instance. Also taxes.)

The next morning, at the hotel's buffet breakfast, we pore over a map of Pakistan on my computer as he talks me through his travels. When he describes his most recent trip, we close in on Bumboret. He points to a valley that heads west-northwest from there toward the Afghan border, and then an area reached by climbing over the range to your left after you have headed far up that valley. "Homeboy's right here," he says.

After he has dialysis at a West Springfield center, we head south in Scott's truck, stopping when he needs something to drink because his hand is cramping badly from the lack of fluid. Wherever we eat, he flirts shamelessly with the waitress. "I'm a dogat least I'm honest about it," he'll repeat at such times. He has told me that he doesn't particularly care for the media nickname that seems to have stuck the most, Rocky Mountain Rambo, but I'm not so sure. When I see him write down his name for strangers, he'll write "Rocky Mountain Rambo" beneath it, and when there's a problem finding a New York hotel reservation, he wonders aloud whether he might have been booked under the name Rocky Mountain Rambo.

On the road, having to raise even his unbridled voice over the thumping of the rain on the truck, he suddenly starts to tell me about the whippings his father used to give him. When it comes to the moment in the story when he finally stands up to his father, he still gets belted one more time, but then tells his father, "If you ever touch me again, I'm going to cut your throat in your sleep," and says how much better their relationship was from that day on. He follows this with the strange statement: "I think he actually wanted to create me like this." Gary says that that day, the day he stood up to his father, was the day he decided something. "I'm not going to put up with anybody's bullshit," he says. "And from that day on, I was hell on wheels. And I was purposely looking for this moment, but I was also looking for what would make me afraid. Still haven't found it. That's why I'm able to go and do what I do. No fear."

These are not necessarily the words you want to hear from a man behind the wheel of a truck on a freeway on a rainy night with an unlicensed gun in a bag beside him who has just had a rum and Coke at the Olive Garden, but I think they nonetheless explain something about such a man.

All the time Faulkner returns to the same theme. "I can't wait to get back and finish the mission," he says. "I'm tired, but I have one more rodeo to go." He constantly talks about the money he needs to buy equipment for his return to Pakistan. "People don't realize this isn't overI've still got to finish this," he says. "If I gotta go boost a bank, I'm going after this guy. There is nothing that's going to stop my ass from getting this dude."

Two sensible ways of judging the sincerity of someone's beliefs are by how consistently they are held over a long period of time and by what someone is prepared to sacrifice for them. By these standards, Faulkner scores well.

On other counts? If I wanted to play up Gary Faulkner's heroism, I would point out that his claim that he's betting his life on what he believes in is quite probably true. If I wanted to make him seem unlikable, perhaps I would detail some of his less anchored rants, full of anger and misogyny (for instance, his account of his murderous state of mind during a bitter dispute with his sister: "As God is my witness, I wanted to break that bitch's neck. If I'd have got hold of her neck, I had a place where I was going to put the body"). If I wanted to bolster his credibility, I would quote from the New York Times blog that cited Pentagon sources and suggested that Faulkner may very well turn out to be looking in the right place.

And if I wanted to convince most people that he was crazy beyond belief, then perhaps all I would have to do is betray what he considers sensitive operational secrets about his forthcoming twelfth and final attempt, a plan that makes hang gliding your way into the Pakistani tribal areas seem both practical and foolproof by comparison. I would also explain how he has a fixed date by which this must be achieved before Al Qaeda detonates a small nuclear device at Mecca and unleashes a global holy war of unimaginable proportions upon us all. And then perhaps I might mention how, after the successful resolution of his mission, he believes that he will become king of a Central American nation.

But there is little point. For him, ultimately this is not about strategy or sanity or feasibility or probability. It is about faith, and faith cannot be fought by argument, and when faced with doubt and scorn it often thrives. Its only repudiation is disbelief. And whatever you choose to believe or disbelieve, Gary Faulkner intends to continue as he has.

"The thing I'm about to do is the least likely," he says. "The most improbably unlikely, outrageous, crazier-than-hell idea is the one that will get my mission accomplished. And that is sweet. I giggle to myself."

Gary Faulkner believes that by the time this article is published, he will be triumphantly completing his mission in the rubble of a cave in northwest Pakistan.

If he fails, it will be one more victory for rationality; one more victory for everyone who likes to see the world carry on spinning evenly and predictably; one more victory for common sense. It will be one more sad victory for all of us who never really tried.

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